Baratillo Cusco

This guide to Baratillo, Cusco's Saturday flea market, opens with vendors half-joking that you could haggle over the exact phone stolen from your pocket an hour earlier, and traces how the city's economy of loss and its economy of bargains have become the same market. You'll hear how the trade works, why guidebooks tell newcomers to sling their bags across their chests before turning onto Prolongacion Pera street, and about the honest side too, antique textiles, hand-carved guitars on Bellavista street, and a healer's stone still waiting for a buyer who knows its use. Nobody here is required to explain where anything came from.